14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the very first photo of the next-generation OLPC XO 2.0 low-cost laptop has finally emerged on the Internet, showing us some of the things we should be expecting. In addition to that, it looks like Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, has confirmed that the next-generation XO laptop is going for a different design and marketing strategy. To be more specific, the upcoming laptop, which could be released sooner rather than later, will be meant to provide users with a book that can be a laptop as compared with the first XO laptop, which was meant as a laptop that could be a book.
A picture of the upcoming OLPC XO 2.0 laptop was taken by Tariq Krim, the founder and CEO of netbvibes, with his mobile phone. The picture, although a bit blurry, was apparently taken at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It shows a dual-screen device with touchscreen capabilities, which is apparently used to interact with a digital map of Africa. Given the details, the picture could pretty much be the first one to provide details of the much anticipated XO 2.0 laptop.
There are few specifications to go on for the time being but, according to some recent statements made by the founder of the OLPC project, Nicholas Negroponte, the project's next-generation portable computer system, designed as a $75 dual-screen device, is going to be provided as an open book. What this basically means is that we are likely to see companies such as ASUS or Acer, also known for their small-sized, low-cost netbook systems, provide their very own OLPC-based laptops.
“One important thing about the XO-2 is that we're going to do it as an open source hardware programme. The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google – we'll want people to copy it. We'll make the constituent parts available. We'll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1,” said Nicholas Negroponte.
There are several reasons to be anticipating the new XO laptop, one of which is that it will provide some of the most necessary hardware features for a price tag that is lower than anything currently available on the market. Pupils in the lower-developed countries will be able to take advantage of a better education thanks to this tool.